contributed photo Sen. Chuck Grassley speaks on the Senate floor in 2020.

Iowa’s longest-serving U.S. senator, and the 10th longest-serving senator in American history, Chuck Grassley, recently filed the paperwork to seek an eighth term.

While the senator said he has not absolutely made up his mind about another campaign, in public comments he seems to be indicating he will run, and tellingly he made an effort to head off the inevitable question about whether, at age 87, he’s too old to keep doing the job.

“My age comes up, and this morning I got up at four o’clock like I do six times a week and jogged two miles,” Grassley told reporters during a late February conference call. “If I can do that every day, I hope nobody has any questions about my ability to conduct a campaign. It’ll be up to the voters to decide whether or not I should be re-elected, but I hope they won’t say I can’t conduct a campaign.”

With 40 years in the Senate behind him, Grassley represents, perhaps more than any other current American politician, the arc of transformation of the modern Republican Party from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of Donald Trump. As Grassley and his constituents contemplate potentially another six years in the Senate, it’s worth revisiting the politics of 1980 when the Butler County farmer won his first term.

As I describe in a new book, 1980 was a transformative year in American political history. Not only did Reagan win the White House in a landslide against incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, but Republicans also captured control of the Senate for the first time since 1954. It was a time of considerable political upheaval when a prolonged crisis dominated the news — American diplomats and embassy personnel were held hostage in Iran for 444 days — inflation spun out of control and tensions with the Soviet Union were palpable.

It was also a time when the emergent New Right, a collection of highly ideological conservative groups, including the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and the Moral Majority, asserted themselves nationally for the first time. NCPAC served as a kind of political quarterback for these groups that also included the American Conservative Union and the Committee for the Survival of Free Congress. They all came to play in Iowa in 1980 and they came to help Grassley defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. John Culver.

Culver, in his first term in the Senate after serving 10 years in Congress, was one of four incumbent Democrats targeted by NCPAC for defeat in 1980. Other targets of the group were Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana and George McGovern of South Dakota, all of whom lost to New Right conservative opponents. Grassley was an early beneficiary of the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” propelled by the increasingly ideological politics of the New Right.

NCPAC’s executive director, Terry Dolan, a brash, quotable and effective conservative activist who worked out of a high-rise office complex in Arlington, Virginia, was unrelenting in his criticism of Culver. “Culver is the most obnoxious,” Dolan said of the Democrats his group targeted in 1980, but Dolan also admitted Culver was “fairly effective as a senator.”

Culver’s ability as a legislator and his interest in bipartisan cooperation were widely recognized by his Senate colleagues, with reporter Elizabeth Drew concluding, as Dolan had, that Culver “established a reputation as one of the most effective members of the Senate.” Although junior in seniority, Culver worked hard, demanded much of himself and his staff and quickly established himself as a leading authority on national security issues. He “is not a saint,” Drew wrote in 1978, but she also concluded “he is not an ideologue.”

The Culver-Grassley campaign was long, bitter and angry. NCPAC and likeminded groups labeled Culver “a baby killer,” weak on national security, a traitor for “giving away the Panama Canal,” bad for American families and in one particularly odious attack, tried to link the Iowa senator to a deadly accident involving Culver’s college friend Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. The attacks were specifically designed to stimulate anger and spark resentment.

The intensely negative campaign against Culver damaged his popularity with Iowans — NCPAC and other groups spent freely on direct mail, television, newspaper and radio advertising — and the attacks on his character were nearly impossible to counter. Since much of the “negative stuff,” as Dolan frankly said, was done by a technically “independent” group separate from Grassley’s own campaign, the challenger enjoyed the benefits of seeing his opponent tarnished while plausibly staying distant from the mudslinging.

“People in my state don’t like this kind of imported smear campaign,” Culver said of the attacks. “But the propaganda keeps coming and the danger is by sheer repetition they will be able to make the most outrageous lies seem credible.” Culver warned presciently that “New Right extremists” would poison campaigns, damage the Senate and destroy bipartisanship.

Grassley won the 1980 election in a walk and no challenger has come close to him since. You can make a case that the Iowa senator, whose career has included chairing two of the Senate’s most important committees and service with seven different presidents, was present at the creation of the modern Republican Party.

Dolan was remarkably candidly in discussing the likely consequences of his conservative political action committee in 1980. “Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process,” Dolan said. “A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”

NCPAC-style character attacks on liberals are now standard operating procedure in American politics. Independent expenditure campaigns like those supportive of Grassley in 1980 are ubiquitous. Over the last 40 years, Senate elections have increasingly become national contests focused more on partisan control of the Senate than the quality of the candidates or state level concerns. And vast amounts of unregulated money, as evidenced by the $430 million in outside spending in the recent Georgia runoff elections, now flows into every Senate campaign.

The Culver-Grassley contest is worth remembering not only as the launching pad for the long political career of one of Iowa’s most successful politicians, but also as one of the earliest indicators of how anger, grievance and distortion would come to warp our politics. There are many mile markers over the 40-year evolution of the modern GOP, the election of 1980 was in many ways the starting line.

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Marc C. Johnson is a historian and columnist.